Of all the places your child goes to on the Internet, chat rooms are the most difficult sites for you as a parent to monitor. These locations permit the kind of person you would usually avoid in person to easily and readily approach your children. See what happens in this scenario:
Robert, a middle school student, enters a chat room for young teenagers and gets into the flow of conversation. He tells how old he is and where he goes to school. He gets a response from someone who appears to be a thirteen-year-old girl named Jennifer. Her messages come with misspelled words and typing mistakes, and she sounds like a teenager, but in reality she is a forty-two-year-old man who is looking for young teenage boys to take advantage of. This pedophile may select Robert out of the group and invite him to enter a private room.
Pretending to be Jennifer, the pedophile might talk to Robert over several nights or weeks, becoming friendlier and friendlier and perhaps easing the conversation into sexual topics. Sooner or later, in most cases like this, Jennifer may ask where Robert lives and perhaps his phone number. Worse yet, this pedophile may try to set up a meeting with Robert.
Parents can work to minimize the chances of this happening by doing the following:
- Restrict the hours that kids can spend online. As a general rule, the later at night one is on line, the more suspect the activity that occurs.
- Ask your child what they are doing online. Sit down with them from time to time to see what they are doing.
- Point out stories in the newspaper about cyber predators.
- Make sure your child does not give out information over the Internet that would lead a person to find your child in real life.